Dropbox, valued privately at $10 billion, files for IPO

Dropbox Inc., a file-sharing company that has been privately valued at $10 billion, filed Friday for a U.S. initial public stock offering, saying it was at scale and capable of moving fast.

The San Francisco company filed with an offering size of $500 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That amount is a placeholder and is likely to change. The company plans to use the proceeds to pay down debt and for general corporate purposes.

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Dropbox, which was valued at $10 billion in its 2014 funding round, would be one of the biggest U.S. enterprise technology companies to list domestically in several years. First Data Corp. went public at a market value of about $14 billion in 2015 — the biggest such IPO in the past five years.

“While we’re at scale, we can still move quickly,” Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi said in a letter to shareholders included in Friday’s filing. “Imagine if every minute at work were well spent — if we could focus and spend our time on the things that matter. This is the world we want to live in.”

Although Dropbox has been touting its scale — with more than 500 million registered users — and that it is cash-flow positive, the filing gives a more in-depth look at its financial situation. The company’s revenue increased more 30% last year to $1.1 billion, up from $845 million in 2016. In the same period, the company’s net loss shrank to $112 million from $210 million.

Dropbox’s service enables companies to keep documents in a commonly accessible place without having to build their own server farms.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG and Allen & Co. are leading the offering. The company plans to list on Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol DBX.

2:10 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with additional details.